New York Citycity and port located at the mouth of the Hudson River, southeastern New York state, northeastern U.S. It is the largest and most influential American metropolis, encompassing Manhattan and Staten islands, the western sections of Long Island, and a small portion of the New York state mainland to the north of Manhattan. New York City is in reality a collection of many neighbourhoods scattered among the city’s five boroughs—Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island—each exhibiting its own lifestyle. Moving from one city neighbourhood to the next may be like passing from one country to another. New York is the most populous and the most international city in the country. Its urban area extends into adjoining parts of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Located where the Hudson and East rivers empty into one of the world’s premier harbours, New York is both the gateway to the North American continent and its preferred exit to the oceans of the globe. Area 305 square miles (790 square km). Pop. (2000) city, 8,008,278; New York–White Plains–Wayne MD, 11,296,377; New York–Northern New Jersey–Long Island MSA, 18,323,002; (2006 est.) city, 8,214,426; (2007 est.) New York–White Plains–Wayne MD, 11,607,843; New York–Northern New Jersey–Long Island MSA, 18,815,988.

Character of the city

New York is the most ethnically diverse, religiously varied, commercially driven, famously congested, and, in the eyes of many, the most attractive urban centre in the country. No other city has contributed more images to the collective consciousness of Americans: Wall Street means finance, Broadway is synonymous with theatre, Fifth Avenue is automatically paired with shopping, Madison Avenue means the advertising industry, Greenwich Village connotes bohemian lifestyles, Seventh Avenue signifies fashion, Tammany Hall defines machine politics, and Harlem evokes images of the Jazz Age, African American aspirations, and slums. The word tenement brings to mind both the miseries of urban life and the upward mobility of striving immigrant masses. New York has more Jews than Tel Aviv, more Irish than Dublin, more Italians than Naples, and more Puerto Ricans than San Juan. Its symbol is the Statue of Liberty, but the metropolis is itself an icon, the arena in which Emma Lazarus’s “tempest-tost” people of every nation are transformed into Americans—and if they remain in the city, they become New Yorkers.

For the past two centuries, New York has been the largest and wealthiest American city. More than half the people and goods that ever entered the United States came through its port, and that stream of commerce has made change a constant presence in city life. New York always meant possibility, for it was an urban centre on its way to something better, a metropolis too busy to be solicitous of those who stood in the way of progress. New York—while the most American of all the country’s cities—thus also achieved a reputation as both foreign and fearsome, a place where turmoil, arrogance, incivility, and cruelty tested the stamina of everyone who entered it. The city was inhabited by strangers, but they were, as James Fenimore Cooper explained, “essentially national in interest, position, pursuits. No one thinks of the place as belonging to a particular state but to the United States.” Once the capital of both its state and the country, New York surpassed such status to become a world city in both commerce and outlook, with the most famous skyline on earth. It also became a target for international terrorism—most notably the destruction in 2001 of the World Trade Center, which for three decades had been the most prominent symbol of the city’s global prowess. However, New York remains for its residents a conglomeration of local neighbourhoods that provide them with familiar cuisines, languages, and experiences. A city of stark contrasts and deep contradictions, New York is perhaps the most fitting representative of a diverse and powerful nation.

The landscape

The city site

Sections of the granite bedrock of New York date to about 100 million years ago, but the topography of the present city is largely the product of the glacial recession that marked the end of the Wisconsin Glacial Stage about 10,000 years ago. Great erratic boulders in Manhattan’s Central Park, deep kettle depressions in Brooklyn and Queens, and the glacial moraine that remains in parts of the metropolitan area provide silent testimony to the enormous power of the ice. Glacial retreat also carved out the waterways around the city. The Hudson and East rivers, Spuyten Duyvil Creek, and Arthur Kill are, in reality, estuaries of the Atlantic Ocean, and the Hudson is tidal as far north as Troy. The approximately 600 miles (1,000 km) of New York shoreline are locked in constant combat with the ocean, as it erodes the land and adds new sediments elsewhere. Although the harbour is constantly dredged, ship channels are continually filled with river silt and are too shallow for more modern deep-sea vessels.

South of the rockbound terrain of Manhattan stretches a sheltered, deepwater anchorage offering easy access to the Atlantic Ocean. In 1524 the Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano was the first European to enter the harbour, which he named Santa Margarita, and he reported that the hills surrounding the vast expanse of New York Bay appeared to be rich in minerals; more than 90 species of precious stone and 170 of the world’s minerals have actually been found in New York. Verrazzano’s daring expedition was commemorated in 1964, when what was then the world’s longest suspension bridge was dedicated to span the Narrows at the entrance to Upper New York Bay.

Only the third largest American port at the time of the American Revolution, New York gradually achieved trade domination and by the mid-1800s handled more than half of the country’s oceangoing travelers and commercial trade. After 1900 New York was the world’s busiest port, a distinction it held until the 1950s. Cargo containerization, the obsolescence of its waterfront piers, and soaring labour costs shifted business to the New Jersey side of the river after the 1960s, but at the beginning of the 21st century the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey still dominated the water trade of the northeastern United States.

Climate and plant and animal life

The average temperature in January is about 31 °F (0 °C) and in June about 72 °F (22 °C), but recorded temperature extremes range from −15 to 106 °F (−26 to 41°C). Because of New York’s moderate climate, the harbour rarely freezes. The annual precipitation is 44 inches (1,120 mm).

The city’s flora and fauna are testimony to the rapid changes in the ecosystem imposed by urban settlement. In areas that once were hunting and fishing paradises for several bands of Native Americans, the most prevalent animals today are the cockroach and the Norway rat, both introduced to the city via trade with Europe. A wide variety of animal species are still found within the city, including 80 species of fish, scores of birds from the peregrine falcon to the pigeon, and such mammals as the raccoon and the occasional urban coyote. Wildlife refuges at Jamaica Bay and in Clove Lakes (Staten Island) and Alley Pond (Queens) parks provide sanctuaries for many species, allowing them to survive even within an unfavourable city environment. Vegetation has sufficient precipitation but has been reduced and destroyed with the advance of urban sprawl. The dominant characteristics of contemporary city plants are their ability to thrive despite acid rain and air that contains large components of ozone, vehicle emissions, and industrial by-products. However, the city’s two botanical gardens, one in the Bronx and the other in Brooklyn, are highly regarded throughout the country, and zoos in every borough enchant visitors of all ages.

The city layout

The city’s ancient bedrock provides the immovable foundation for hundreds of modern skyscrapers. New York has more of these awesome structures than any other world city. Architects may argue about the origin of the modern skyscraper, but most agree that Manhattan was where structures with steel skeletons were combined with the elevator to create a genre of buildings where great height could be reached practicably; the very word was coined in the 1880s to describe this New York phenomenon.

The earliest pathways for moving around Manhattan Island followed animal and Native American trails across difficult terrain; Broadway still follows one of these routes, which extended northward through the island. City planning was foreign to burghers in the 17th century, and roads were haphazardly authorized; only a few important ones to outlying agricultural communities were maintained, and it was not until 1798 that the city appointed a commissioner of streets. Colonial nonchalance is still visible in the meandering streets of Lower Manhattan. The optimistic spirit of the town is apparent in the street plan adopted in 1811, a grid of blocks, avenues, streets, and lots extending to the northern reaches of the island. City Hall, located now as then in Manhattan, was at that time so far removed from the centre of activity that its northern facade was left unfinished, since few could imagine it would ever be seen. Although often modified in specific cases, the rectilinear patterns imposed upon Manhattan in its infancy have determined its developmental patterns, and other boroughs adopted the system after the creation of Greater New York in 1898. The building of Central Park interrupted the grid, and road construction there pioneered concepts of limited-access and transverse-running roadways. In the 20th century, parkways were incorporated into the traffic patterns of all boroughs, as Eastern and Ocean parkways in Brooklyn, Riverside Drive (Manhattan), the Grand Concourse (the Bronx), and Queens Boulevard attest. Regardless of all its efforts, the modern city is infamous for the volume of traffic that clogs its well-laid-out street system.

The boroughs

The administrative structure of New York was shaped by the consolidation of the greater city in January 1898. Following the 19th-century pattern of urban imperialism, and in large part spurred by the challenge that Chicago posed to its primacy, modern New York was formed when the independent city of Brooklyn, the portion of Westchester county called the Bronx, Staten Island, and large parts of Queens county were added to Manhattan following a referendum. Although the population of the city expanded from about 2 million to 3.4 million, much of the new territory was still rural, and only two-fifths of all roads in the expanded city were paved. The five boroughs, which were all soon designated counties of New York state, became the basic municipal administrative units. The office of borough president was created to preserve “local pride and affection,” and its duties from 1901 to 1990 included service on the Board of Estimate, a central financial agency. Borough presidents now also serve as conduits of neighbourhood concern to the mayor, the city’s chief administrator, and are responsible for appointing members of community boards, the City Planning Commission, and the Board of Education. These officials carry much of the burden in the continuous New York battle between strong mayors seeking central authority and local leaders aspiring to independent action.

In the early 20th century, when the population of Greater New York more than doubled, a major concern of city administrators was interlacing communication and transportation systems to create coherence within the metropolitan area. The first segment of the subway system opened in 1904, and soon all the boroughs were linked except Staten Island. In the 1930s and ’40s the system often handled more than two billion passengers per year; the world’s most extensive subway system soon became the best way to move about the metropolis. An ever-growing number of bridges, tunnels, and highways, designed to facilitate commerce, now take, along with the subways, hordes of commuters into Manhattan in the morning and return them home at night. Hundreds of thousands of “outer borough” residents and suburbanites work in and travel to Manhattan every day, in one of the great marvels of urban planning. Except for Staten Island, each of the boroughs considered independently would rank among the largest cities in the United States. Borough legislators constantly complain that their concerns are ignored, and many believe that local interests are usually sacrificed for the welfare of New York county (Manhattan). This perception led Staten Island to contemplate seceding from New York City and becoming an independent city in the 1990s.

Manhattan

More than 30 million tourists visit New York annually, but most of these rarely see much beyond the 22.6 square miles (58.5 square km) of Manhattan island, the smallest city borough. Divided by 12 north-south avenues and crossed by 220 east-west streets, Manhattan is easily understood and infinitely alluring. It is the original New York, boasts the world’s largest collection of skyscrapers, and is overloaded with cultural institutions and places of enduring interest. Even to residents of the other boroughs, Manhattan is “the city,” the administrative, business, and financial centre of the metropolis and the basis of their renown. In no other part of New York are there such stark contrasts between rich and poor. The high-rise elegance of Park Avenue and the Upper East Side rapidly gives way to the teeming streets of Harlem to the north and to the crowded bohemian existence of the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village to the south. This cruel modern dichotomy echoes the 19th-century city, where industrial millionaires lived in luxury in Fifth Avenue mansions (now largely converted into cultural centres) far from the immigrant masses on the Lower East Side (whose sufferings the Tenement Museum now honours).

Within this formidable historical imbalance, Manhattan is really composed of neighbourhoods that offer peaceful havens to contented residents. Many areas of the island are world famous, among them such ethnic enclaves as Chinatown, Yorkville, Little Italy, and Spanish and Black Harlem. In the streets snaking north from the ancient Dutch Battery, twisting lanes remind walkers that Manhattan was a trade centre before Boston, Philadelphia, or Williamsburg existed. Wall Street, the financial centre of the globe, was originally a Dutch fortification (1653) against feared British or Native American attacks that never came. The jumble of pre-Revolutionary streets continues up to Houston Street, where the grid pattern becomes dominant and continues up the island. Soho (short for “south of Houston”) covers much of the old immigrant East Side and now has been matched by a Noho neighbourhood. To the west is Henry James’s Washington Square and beyond that Greenwich Village, formerly a haven for artists but today home to the affluent and professional classes. In 2003 the first section of Hudson River Park opened. Scheduled to extend from Battery Park to 59th Street, the park will cover some 550 acres (223 hectares) of renovated piers and waterfront land when it is completed. Chelsea and Gramercy Park offer diverse attractions before one reaches Times Square, the “Crossroads of the World,” recently transformed from a sleazy strip to a centre of tourism. At Columbus Circle visitors may enter Central Park, some 840 acres (340 hectares) of greenery created by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the mid-19th century to serve as the “lungs” of the city and defended with vigour against all commercial encroachment. The Upper West Side is filled with brownstone blocks and high-rise apartments and is home ground to the liberal, Democratic Party politics long identified with the modern city. East Harlem is Hispanic, as is Washington Heights, but the two are separated by Black Harlem and the academic bastion of Columbia University on Morningside Heights. At the far north of the island—where Manhattan actually spills into the Bronx—Irish influence predominates. Only in the few blocks of Marble Hill is Manhattan part of the mainland United States.

No area of New York demonstrates change and dynamism as fully as Manhattan. Millions enter it daily to seek their fortunes, and additional millions come to marvel at their efforts. It is Manhattan that they label a “great place, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” More than half of the buildings in the world with 50 or more floors are located there, but its storied past can be partly recaptured by visiting South Street Seaport, riding the Staten Island Ferry, or walking through its distinctive neighbourhoods. Manhattan means Tammany Hall, the archetype of the political machine, as well as the reformers that overthrew the “Tiger.” It is supremely cosmopolitan, boasting the world’s best restaurants and a myriad of cultural institutions, yet folksy enough to have block parties. Manhattan’s variety and pace make New York the number one tourist city in America.

The Bronx

The Bronx is the northernmost borough and (except for a tiny sliver of Manhattan) the only part of New York on the mainland. It was first settled by farmers and for centuries remained rural. Originally tied to Manhattan only by the King’s Bridge across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, it was the scene of much conflict during the American Revolution, but afterward it became the area where wealthy politicians and merchants established summer homes. In the late 19th century it was home to a racetrack where the Belmont Stakes were run until 1889. Railroads, additional bridges, and commerce gradually bound the Bronx to the lower city, and in 1874 the towns of Morrisania, West Farms, and Kingsbridge were annexed by Manhattan. Elevated rail lines soon entered two new wards of the city, and vast parks were authorized; the modern borough, 42 square miles (109 square km) in area, is still one-fourth parkland. When additional land from the Bronx was added to New York in the consolidation of 1898, the modern borough was created. Prior to 1910 subway lines snaked their way north to facilitate population growth in the former farmland. By the time Bronx county was established in 1914, it had large groups of Italians, Jews, Irish, and Armenians. Many found work on public works projects, such as those that built parks, the Bronx Zoo, the New York Botanical Garden, or the Jerome Park Reservoir. Others laboured on the uptown campus of New York University, which is home to the country’s first Hall of Fame (for Great Americans), expanded the subway system, or constructed Yankee Stadium (1923), the house that baseball legend Babe Ruth reputedly built. Fordham Road became a major shopping street, and the Grand Concourse won favour as one of the most prestigious addresses in the city. The borough still has the greatest number of Art Deco buildings in the world.

An old Broadway song informed Americans that “the Bronx is up,” but few areas of the country experienced such a precipitous drop from prosperity. For a decade after the mid-1960s, the Bronx became the scene of classic urban decay caused by crime, drug dealers, renegade landlords, and the strain of accepting wave after wave of immigrants. Puerto Ricans won political power when they elected Herman Badillo as borough president; they later sent him to the U.S. Congress. However, the reputation of the borough came not from enlightened ethnic advance but from the fires that consumed its buildings and the drug and gang wars that destroyed its young people. Although fully linked to the metropolis by railroads and such bridges as the Triborough Robert F. Kennedy (1936; formerly called Triborough), Whitestone (1939), and Throgs Neck (1961), the South Bronx became a place to leave as quickly as possible. Internally, Jewish residents fled the Grand Concourse to live in Co-op City, a housing complex near Eastchester Bay whose more than 15,000 apartments made it the largest such development in the country. The spread of slum conditions northward from Mott Haven, Hunt’s Point, and Morrisania threatened to turn the entire borough into a blighted area.

During the last quarter of the 20th century, the tide of decay reversed, and the Bronx rebounded in remarkable fashion. Laws that limited insurance payouts sharply reduced acts of landlord arson, and vacant lands were filled with single-family and row housing. Thousands of apartments were rehabilitated or restored with city funds, and hundreds more were saved by individuals who refused to give in to lawlessness. Tensions between competing populations—the borough is one-third African American, one-third Hispanic, and one-third Asian and white—have eased, and attendance at the universities in the borough has increased. The population was rising by the mid-1990s, and the upper-class enclaves of Riverdale and City Island once again ranked as sought-after housing areas for the city elite. Political power has remained in the hands of Hispanic voters, but the entire borough has benefited from a historic recovery.

Brooklyn

The most populous borough of New York, Brooklyn occupies 81 square miles (210 square km) to the east of Manhattan on the western fringe of Long Island. Sections of the area were first settled by the Dutch in the 1630s, and six largely agricultural towns—Brooklyn, Flatlands, Flatbush, New Utrecht, Bushwick, and Gravesend—soon thrived. Consolidated as Kings county in 1683, the region grew modestly as an appendage of Manhattan. During the American Revolution, Brooklyn was the scene of the Battle of Long Island (August 27, 1776). After the British occupied New York, their notorious prison ships were anchored in Wallabout Bay; a memorial to the thousands who died stands in Fort Greene Park. Early in the 19th century, Brooklyn became the world’s first modern commuter suburb, and Brooklyn Heights was transformed into a wealthy residential community. Modern-day entrepreneurs have restored ferry service across the East River, and the esplanade along the heights rewards visitors with an unrivaled view of Manhattan’s shore and skyline.

To the chagrin of New York, Brooklyn became an independent city in 1834 and soon adopted the grid form of street layout. By the 1880s it had about 20,000 industrial jobs and handled more waterborne tonnage than its rival; during the American Civil War the Monitor had been constructed at the Continental Iron Works in Greenpoint. Brooklyn had its own Academy of Music (1859) and Historical Society (1863) and, in Prospect Park (1870s), an urban green space that represented a more mature version of Olmsted’s vision across the river; it ranked among the largest cities in the country in the last four decades of the 19th century. However, the construction of John Roebling and Washington Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan (completed 1883) doomed its independent existence, as business interests craved closer ties to the metropolis. Overcoming the opposition of the local Democratic machine, Brooklyn accepted consolidation by a margin of only 277 votes and became a part of Greater New York in 1898.

Contemporary Brooklyn retains much of the independent character it displayed as an industrial city. It has its own shopping mecca (around Flatbush Avenue), a Civic Center, and even a Chinatown in Sunset Park. Additional access to Manhattan came with the construction of the Williamsburg (1903) and Manhattan (1909) bridges and later through Battery Tunnel (1950). In the 1920s full subway service was extended as far as Coney Island, and in 1931 the borough became home to New York’s first airport, Floyd Bennett Field (now part of Gateway National Recreation Area). Brooklyn had something that Manhattan could never match, a beloved baseball team, the Dodgers, playing in a wonderfully intimate ball park, Ebbets Field; many hearts were broken when the team decamped to California in 1957, and the field was subsequently demolished. Brooklyn remains famous for its multiplicity of houses of worship serving neighbourhoods as varied as Brighton Beach and Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge and Ridgewood, and Canarsie and Cobble Hill. Although the borough has many private homes, the majority of its people live in apartments, mammoth housing projects, or upgraded row housing. Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville have some of the worst slums in New York, with blocks of burned-out and abandoned buildings. Tensions between African Americans and Hasidic Jews in the biracial area of Crown Heights led to a prolonged conflict in the 1990s, and their relationship has remained strained. On the other hand, careful use of landmark protection legislation has enabled several historic neighbourhoods to restore their viability. The originality of the borough is visible in the creation of new areas such as DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) and the revitalization of underused piers for shipping.

Queens

Queens county would constitute a major American city were it not a part of New York. Its 120 square miles (311 square km), more than one-third of the city, feature a primarily middle-class population owning private homes, although in such areas as Forest Hills apartments predominate. During colonial times a significant battle for religious freedom, the Flushing Remonstrance (1657), was fought in Queens; it was a first victory for the tolerance necessary in an urban centre. In the 19th century Queens had several racetracks and two shorelines that attracted the wealthy, and it served as the final resting place for deceased New Yorkers. Its Calvary Cemetery is still the largest in the nation, while 7,000 veterans of the American Civil War are buried in Cypress Hills on its border with Brooklyn. The Long Island Rail Road (1836), originally intended to shorten the trip from New York to the Boston ferry, traversed land that was largely agricultural. That situation changed after 1870 when what essentially were company towns were established by William Englehardt Steinway (pianos) and Conrad Poppenhusen (rubber); the later development of the Newtown Creek area brought heavy industry and drew many immigrant workers into the county.

In 1894 the communities of western Queens endorsed the creation of Greater New York, but parts of its eastern territory ultimately became Nassau county. The borough grew rapidly once the Queensboro Bridge opened (1909) and the Long Island Rail Road was connected to Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station (1910), and subway service was established soon thereafter. A pleasing mix of the urban and the rural, Queens was the centre of the silent-film industry until displaced by Hollywood in the late 1920s. The growing borough had more than a million people even before it was lashed to the Bronx by three bridges and to Manhattan by the Midtown Tunnel (1940). Pioneer aviator Glenn Curtiss flew from Albany to New York City in a little less than three hours in 1910, thus issuing in the age of domestic aviation, and the flat, open spaces of Queens became popular for airfields. It became an international arrival centre when La Guardia Airport opened in 1939 and Idlewild International Airport in 1948, the latter subsequently renamed to honour President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Access to transportation and a lower-density population made Flushing Meadows in Queens a natural site for the two world’s fairs held in New York City in 1939–40 and 1964–65. The borough also annually hosts the United States Open Tennis Championships.

In a diverse and cosmopolitan city, Queens ranks as the most ethnically varied of all the boroughs. It is perhaps too simple to refer to Irish Woodside, Greek Astoria, Polish-Lithuanian Maspeth, or Italian Corona, but those groups do predominate. Vast numbers of Chinese, Koreans, and East Indians have transformed Flushing into the largest of New York’s three Asian centres and revived a once anemic local economy in the bargain. More than half of the city’s Latin Americans, from more than a dozen nations, live in Queens, and their restaurants and travel agencies dominate entire neighbourhoods. African Americans are more fully integrated in Queens than elsewhere in the metropolis, residing primarily in areas such as Hollis, Cambria Heights, St. Alban’s, and Springfield Gardens. The borough has no visible slum area, and its residents are united in rejecting low-income housing and high-rise apartments.

Staten Island

Geographically isolated at the juncture of Upper and Lower New York Bays, Staten Island is 5 miles (8 km) removed from Manhattan by ferry and a mile from Brooklyn across the Narrows. Its 60 square miles (155 square km) are still the least densely populated, most rural part of the city, even though it ranks as the fastest-growing county in the state. When the English conquered New York in 1664, they decided that Staten Island would remain part of that province despite its proximity to New Jersey. A century later, in 1776, British troops launched their conquest of the city from the island. After independence, Richmond borough (later Staten Island) held forts to protect access to New York, quarantine stations for sick immigrants, homes for aged seamen and orphans, and railroad terminals for Manhattan’s freight. When its voters chose to become part of the greater city, its population was slightly more than 65,000.

After 1900 a civic centre and borough hall were constructed in St. George near the ferry ramps. Water-system real estate speculators attempted to start a boom when Richmond was connected to the city, but the prospect faded away once direct subway access failed to materialize. Until the 1930s the borough experienced slow industrial and population growth, and only after the Goethals (1928), Outerbridge Crossing (1928), and Bayonne (1931) bridges were built did stagnation cease. Construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (1964) finally opened the borough to rapid development and made it a functional part of city life. Truck farming has ended and factories have closed on the island, but borough residents have managed to retain the integrity of their nearly 3,000-acre (1,200-hectare) park, the Greenbelt, the largest such amenity in the metropolis.

Staten Island is the most homogeneous borough in New York; it has the lowest proportion of ethnic minorities and is the youngest and most politically conservative. Its politicians call the borough underserviced, its residents feel under attack by environmental pollutants from New Jersey, and everyone resents being home to New York’s largest garbage disposal site. A dumping area since 1948, the Fresh Kills site will ultimately reach an elevation of 500 feet (150 metres), the highest point on the East Coast. In 1990, when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a reduction in borough power, Staten Islanders endorsed a move to study secession from New York to become an independent city.

Planning the modern metropolis

Before the creation of Greater New York, city leaders dealt with the needs of citizens less than systematically. Administrations in the 19th century created the street grid, regulated the port and immigration, provided water and sewers, authorized transportation lines, and built parks. No one pretended that Manhattan offered a picture of rational planning, but with a consolidated population of more than three million, a more orderly approach was necessary. Uncontrolled building and atrocious housing conditions were among the primary concerns of progressive thinkers, and their first achievement was a Tenement House Law (1901) that required the installation of fire escapes and toilets in existing “old law” structures. City officials became the overseers of “new law” construction—six-story buildings with dumbwaiters, cooking facilities, hot water, and no inside rooms without windows—and within 15 years an additional 200,000 apartments were built. Progressivism’s greatest accomplishment was the city zoning ordinance of 1916, the first attempt by any city to control density, regulate land use, and guarantee light and air to the streets by reshaping structures. By that time, Manhattan was already famed for its skyscrapers, and their height had escalated from the “idiotic” 11 floors of the Tower Building (1889) to the 20 of the Flatiron (1902) and finally to the unprecedented 792-foot (241-metre) Woolworth Building, the “cathedral of commerce” (1913). The new zoning code mandated building setbacks to permit daylight to reach the streets and altered the shape of future construction, and under its restrictions the Chrysler (1930) and Empire State (1931) buildings were completed. Those structures still have two of the most famous silhouettes on earth. After World War II, a “crystal corridor” of buildings was constructed along Park Avenue that has been called the architectural heart of the 20th century. In 1961 the zoning code was altered to encourage developers to add public amenities to their building plans in return for variances. The revision proved less than successful, and in 1990 the City Planning Commission established new building districts in an attempt to decrease the flood of new building in Manhattan.

In 1921 the Port of New York Authority (PA) was formed to deal with regional transportation issues, and it quickly initiated a series of massive construction projects that still serve the city. Widely accused of favouring the automobile over mass transit, the PA added the George Washington Bridge (1931), Lincoln Tunnel (1937), bus and Port Authority Trans-Hudson terminals, satellite communication centres, and the World Trade Center (1970–72; destroyed 2001) to the urban mix. Officials from the PA deferred to the judgments of Robert Moses, the dominant city planner from 1934 until the 1960s, who provided the city with 13 major bridges, more than 400 miles (650 km) of high-speed highways, and hundreds of parks and playgrounds. He also led New York’s efforts at slum clearance, urban renewal, and public housing. More than any other single individual, Moses shaped the contemporary city.

But not even Moses could totally control the chaos of development characteristic of New York. His career perfectly illustrates the adage, “New York will be a great town if they ever finish it.” In truth, aside from a few farmhouses, little remains from the colonial era, and the construction boom after 1945 consumed 19th-century structures at a rapid pace. As Walt Whitman described it, the city had the “pull down and build over again spirit,” which became a New York tradition. However, in 1963, when Pennsylvania Station went under the wrecking ball, outrage led to the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (1965), whose purview was soon extended to interiors and to scenic landmarks. The commission has established historic districts, designated more than 1,000 individual landmarks, and preserved a past that has become increasingly important to New Yorkers. Restoration, preservation, and walking tours have become growth industries within the metropolis.

In 1969 city planners offered a massive regional plan for development, but it failed to win approval. Instead, successive amendments of the city charter in 1975 and 1989 have been used to broaden popular input into city projects. Borough presidents (whose planning responsibilities formerly were largely ignored) and local community boards have now become involved in the preparation of new initiatives. In a city as complex as New York, architectural change is constant, and the total transformation of the Times Square district illuminates the power of design to alter the city. In the 1990s it went from being the national symbol of urban decadence and seediness to a centre of corporate consumerism that now draws families of tourists to its attractions. Elsewhere in the city, such prominent real estate developers as Donald Trump have often won approval for vast projects, but planning officials and local communities have often blocked what they saw as unsuitable land use.

The people

Ethnic and religious diversity

In a city that embraces change as its primary tradition, the shifting population base of New York remains its most dramatic story. At the end of the 20th century, representatives of some 200 national groups were counted among its people. While people of European ancestry still make up one-third of the population, Hispanics account for nearly one-third, and African Americans about one-fourth. The fastest-growing component of the population is Asian, soaring from a tiny proportion in 1970 to more than one-tenth in the late 1990s. Dominicans were the most numerous immigrants during the last decade of the 20th century, but they were closely followed by Russians and Chinese, people yearning to “make it.” The Statue of Liberty, more than a century after its dedication in the harbour (1886), continues to be the most powerful symbol of New York, as it welcomes newcomers into the city’s “golden door.”

People from each ethnic group have climbed the ladder of acculturation, achieved their goals to a greater or lesser extent, and then, in turn, found fault with the masses that followed them to the promised city. As early as 1643, Father (later Saint) Isaac Jogues catalogued 18 languages that were being used on the streets of New Amsterdam, and that cosmopolitan atmosphere was retained when Dutch control ended and Britain assumed power. Jews, Roman Catholics, and numerous ethnic groups lived in Manhattan before the end of the 17th century, but political control remained in the hands of the established merchant elite. When the American Revolution began, more prominent Dutch families—the Van Cortlandts, De Peysters, and Schuylers—supported the cause than did their English counterparts. One unanticipated result of the fighting was that many slaves, perhaps one-fifth of the city population in 1776, won freedom. One of the first “history” books of New York was a satiric look at the merchant elite and the city’s Dutch past written in 1809 by Diedrich Knickerbocker (Washington Irving). Spoken Dutch was heard on city streets until the late 19th century, when such families as the Roosevelts and the Vanderbilts were important members of Manhattan’s elite.

The dedication of the first St. Patrick’s Cathedral between Mott and Mulberry streets in 1815 signaled the rising prominence of the Irish. By 1844, 15 parishes served more than 80,000 Irish Roman Catholics, and it was clear even before the Great Famine immigration of 1845–49 that New York was becoming predominantly Irish. More than 24,000 Germans also lived in Manhattan, a number that vastly increased following the failed revolutions of the 1840s. Irish workers had to contend with signs warning “No Irish need apply,” and their poor circumstances soon created one of New York’s most notorious slums, the Five Points District. Germans, who were largely Protestant or Jewish, were more middle-class and perhaps had a slightly easier acclimation; they created the Kleindeutschland (“Little Germany”) neighbourhood east of the Bowery. So great was the pressure of immigration that Castle Garden, near the Battery, was converted into a reception centre, a role it fulfilled from 1855 to 1890. By the time of the American Civil War, Irish, Germans, and several other ethnic groups made the city’s population more than half foreign-born.

The arrival of “new” immigrants from eastern and southern Europe after 1880 again changed Manhattan. The Irish and Germans, who by then held a vast proportion of political and economic power, deeply resented the Italians, Greeks, Russians, Hungarians, and Poles crowding into their city. Ellis Island, a new immigrant reception station, was built in 1892 to deal with the unprecedented numbers of newcomers, and by 1900 the Lower East Side recorded one of the greatest population densities in world history. Ellis Island processed about 12,000 people per day, and in 1907 some 1.2 million entered the United States through the port. The austere New York Times wrote that “cleanliness is an unknown quality to these people. They cannot be lifted to a higher plane because they do not want to be.” Tuberculosis became the “Jewish” disease, and New York’s police commissioner played the demagogue in 1909 when he asserted that half of all city crime was committed by Russian Jews. Nevertheless, Jews were to transform labour and education in the city, while Italians would become the largest ethnic group. Yet so varied was the city that every large group remained only a minority, and toleration of “the other” became a New York virtue.

Internal migration

An often ignored force of change in New York is the constant internal migration it attracts. Over the years a large proportion of America’s brightest and most ambitious and driven individuals have been drawn to Manhattan. New York displaced Boston as the national cultural centre as early as the mid-19th century, as its newspapers, magazines, and artistic freedom lured the different-minded. By 1900 both Mark Twain and William Dean Howells had found it necessary to live in New York, and Greenwich Village emerged as a haven for nonconformity before World War I. Modern sculpture, Beat poetry, and Abstract Expressionism are only three of the 20th-century artistic movements that trace their origins to the Village scene.

After 1900 the largest group of internal refugees were African Americans fleeing the restrictions of life in the rural South. New York was one of their preferred destinations, and the growth of Harlem as the “black metropolis” was the unintended result. In the first decade of the 20th century, the Afro-American Realty Company began to rent homes to African Americans in what was then a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood, and the churches they attended downtown soon relocated to the north. Growing ethnic and economic hostility led to a white exodus, although East Harlem did remain largely Italian, and by 1930 more than 200,000 African Americans lived in Harlem. Their artistic talents led to the Harlem Renaissance, and their musicians were leaders of the Jazz Age, but the reality remained that the Harlem they dominated was becoming the largest slum in the city. The Great Depression destroyed economic opportunity; high rents forced the subdivision of apartments; and the well-known pathologies of tenement life devastated a poor community. Harlem endured a long decline from which it did not emerge until the 1990s.

White ethnics found no difficulty in deciding that African Americans were ignorant, lazy, and prone to engage in criminal activities. As the first large group entitled to the social reforms of the New Deal era, African Americans were accused of being parasitic users of the welfare system. Similar accusations were later directed at Puerto Ricans, long a presence in the city but whose numbers soared after World War II. However, within a generation, the influx of Dominicans, Cubans, Colombians, and most recently Mexicans altered the fabric of New York in an unexpected manner. In the 1990s the Hispanic population of the city grew by about 400,000, and bilingualism became a reality. Some 2.2 million New Yorkers of Hispanic origin now constitute the largest single group in the city, and it is estimated that one-fifth of the city speaks only Spanish at home. Relations between African Americans and Hispanics have deteriorated, as one wave of early immigrants tends to disdain those who come later.

The economy

Early industries

The seal of the city of New York, adopted in 1686, includes the beaver and the flour barrel, images that document the first major phase of Manhattan’s economic history. New Amsterdam was important to the Dutch because it offered access to the immensely valuable fur trade of a continent. One of the richest men in 19th-century New York was John Jacob Astor, whose fortune was based on fur before he became a real estate speculator. After the British conquest in 1664, the city won a monopoly to grind and pack grain and sent its flour to all world markets. Merchant incomes soared as commerce, both legitimate and via smuggling, became the lifeblood of New York. Any threat to city prosperity was harshly dealt with, and William Kidd’s turn from privateering to piracy led him to the gallows (in London) in 1701.

Shipping and transportation

The shipping enterprise has always characterized New York. Its Dutch-English merchant class dominated the colonial assembly and after 1756 controlled the annual salary grant awarded to the royal governor. A group of 20 merchants organized the country’s first chamber of commerce (1768) at a time when small manufacturing establishments—cloth, timber processing, ropes, and sails—were becoming more common. Rapidly overcoming years of British occupation during the American Revolution, the city filled Caribbean, European, and coastal ports with its vessels within a decade of independence. New Yorkers were the ones who sent the Empress of China on its historic first voyage to East Asia in 1784, and Manhattan was the national leader in both exports and imports by the late 1790s. When inventor Robert Fulton’s steamboat, the Clermont, made its first trip to Albany in 32 hours in 1807, it revolutionized transportation. New York launched the first scheduled shipping to Europe, and its thriving boatyards constructed every type of vessel from harbour lighters to inland steamers to transatlantic passenger ships. Walt Whitman was enthralled by the “tall masts” that turned South Street into a forest. The yacht America (1851), first winner of the race henceforth called America’s Cup, was built there as were many of the fabled clipper ships, the fastest sailing vessels in history. From 1830 until the 1950s New York ranked as the busiest port in the world.

Banking and finance

Commercial banking began in Manhattan in 1784 when the Bank of New York opened for business. It was soon joined by a branch of the First Bank of the United States (1792) and the Manhattan Company (1799), ancestor of what is now The Chase Manhattan Corporation. The origins of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) can be traced to the Buttonwood Agreement of 1792, although the Exchange Board itself was not organized until 1817. After the Erie Canal opened in 1825, banking services became even more centred in the city, and when its merchants entered the cotton trade the commerce of the entire nation flowed into the port. Several financial panics in the 19th century could not prevent the city from dominating the national money markets. Investors and banks from the metropolis provided much of the capital that financed the industrialization of the United States. So great was the influence of New York that the country’s largest firms found it expedient to locate their headquarters there even though—as with Carnegie Steel, American Tobacco, and Standard Oil—the focus of their manufacturing was elsewhere.

The development of industry and trade

Shipping and finance secured New York’s international standing, but manufacturing provided jobs for its teeming population. A multitude of small businesses were centred in Manhattan by the 1850s, and the clothing, furniture, pianos, cigars, and dozens of other products they created boosted city exports. By mid-century New York was the printing centre of the United States with more than 1,000 establishments; in the period 1865–85 the number of magazines published in the city quintupled to 3,300. The influx of skilled Jewish immigrants transformed an already dominant clothing industry into a gargantuan one, employing nearly half of all city workers by 1910. Thus, the interaction of capital, cheap labour, access to raw materials, entrepreneurial initiative, and transportation facilities made New York the ideal place of business. It quickly developed advertising, insurance, and legal services to deal with the needs of its burgeoning manufacturing sector.

The centre of business

By the beginning of the 20th century, New York was the headquarters for more than two-thirds of the top 100 American corporations, and its 25,000 factories manufactured several hundred different industrial products. It led the nation in total factory workers, number of factories, capital valuation, and product value. New York held its leadership position for another three generations and provided nearly one million industrial jobs into the 1950s. In 1960–75 the city lost more than 600,000 of these jobs, as its old economy collapsed and an information age took shape. Banking and financial services became the new engine of development—abetted by the traditional print and advertising sectors of the economy—while white-collar workers with computer skills replaced most of the blue-collar labourers of the past. Although much has been made of the move of clothing production out of New York, it remains the city’s leading industry, and sweatshop conditions reminiscent of the early 1900s still exist in small factories in the Bronx and Queens. Despite all of these changes, the metropolitan area is home to more than one-fifth of the Fortune 500 companies.

The 1970s represented a low point for New York; its national reputation collapsed as the government experienced virtual bankruptcy. High rents, congestion, arson, and crime led to an exodus by businesses and the middle class even after the city began the rebuilding process. Industrial parks, where businesses were given cheaper rents, better utilities, and safety, were authorized in response to the crisis, and major tax incentives were granted to those corporations that remained in the city. The NYSE even threatened to leave, but in the late 1990s it agreed to remain in Manhattan and to construct a new facility. The port, where facilities were outmoded and corruption endemic, began to convert its docks for containerized shipping, to dredge deeper channels, and to plan a direct rail connection between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Old piers were dismantled or converted to other uses, such as amusement centres.

By constantly enhancing its key economic advantages, New York has remained prosperous even as it underwent change, its strength lying in its diversity. The port, which lost some percentage of its shipping to other cities (notably New Orleans, Louisiana; Baltimore, Maryland; and Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada), is still the busiest port on the East Coast and generates billions of dollars of revenue, creates thousands of jobs, and is the focus of major plans for renewal and renovation. Manufacturing positions have declined, but smaller specialty producers of neckties, purses, and leather goods have joined the ready-made-clothing industry to maintain New York’s dominance. A major portion of the country’s software and computer-related industry has located itself in New York and built an urban “Silicon Alley” to mirror California’s Silicon Valley. The city’s continuing financial supremacy was apparent in the 1990s, a decade in which the Dow Jones average quadrupled, and profits for the members of the NYSE soared. New York marketed its monetary expertise to the globe; its banks dealt with the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s as well as the Asian financial meltdown of the late 1990s, and in the process the city became the “economic capital of the world.” The vast numbers of bars, restaurants, hotels, health clubs, and theatres across New York are necessary to care for and feed the millions of visitors who come to the city annually.

Administration and social conditions

Government

New York City is administered by a mayor who chooses department heads and criminal-court justices and prepares the annual budget. Mayors hold considerable power but are constantly involved in legislative battles with the 51 members of the City Council. Both mayor and council members serve a maximum of three four-year terms. In general, beginning with Fiorello La Guardia in the 1930s, the mayors usually have led their own parties and have been stronger than other party leaders.

Two themes are constant in the administrative history of New York: tension between the city leadership and the superior authority of the state in the struggle for home rule, and the municipality’s desire to contain the decentralizing tendencies caused by its component elements. In the Dutch colonial period, the director general of New Netherland was a city resident who ruled both province and burgh, but after 1664 England’s provincial governor named a mayor. In the 1680s Governor Thomas Dongan granted New York its first municipal charter and permitted the election of aldermen, but he retained the right to appoint the mayor, recorder, clerk, and sheriff. Effective control remained in the hands of the governors until it was wrested away by the city aristocracy after 1740. Despite divided authority the city grew rapidly, and by the 1730s it possessed two newspapers, an almshouse, a night watch, and a network of volunteer firemen.

During the time of the American Revolution, New York suffered from a long British occupation and two fires that destroyed one-third of its buildings. Federalist Mayor James Duane, whose own home had been burned to the ground, supervised rebuilding efforts in the 1780s, and his successor Richard Varick completed the reconstruction of city and government. Their efforts, abetted by those of DeWitt Clinton after 1803, established the foundations for New York’s national dominance. After 1800 New York was the nation’s largest city, a commercial dynamo that worked efficiently even as the city became a great melting pot of different peoples. Yet New Yorkers still lacked the right to elect their own mayor; only in 1834 did Jacksonian Cornelius Lawrence initiate democratic control, which subsequently has been characteristic of the metropolis. One area in which voters of all classes agreed was the need to improve city services, and in April 1835 they approved the creation of a new water supply. New York’s Croton Aqueduct opened in 1842, inaugurating a century of city efforts to tap regional water resources and provide citizens with some of the nation’s best-quality drinking water; this better water was also vital in ending the epidemics that periodically struck the city. Manhattan’s desire for home rule was often at odds with the plans of upstate legislators, and in 1857 Albany authorized the Metropolitan Police District to cover four urban counties. Involvement by the state created two competing police forces, and their subsequent battles were ended only by the intervention of the state militia. Not until 1870—after massive bribery by “Boss” William Magear Tweed—was local police power restored. Tweed’s charter increased the authority of the office of mayor in governance matters and, after the “Tweed ring” was overthrown in 1871, a reform charter added power to the office of comptroller. The Board of Estimate and City Council also were established to direct city development.

New York in the 19th century, while primarily under the control of the Tammany Hall political machine, constructed Manhattan’s basic water, sewer, fire, police, transportation, and park facilities. There was, naturally, some corruption and a great deal of what insiders like George Washington Plunkitt called “honest graft,” but the experience gained in building Manhattan permitted the greater city to construct an infrastructure capable of serving a far denser population. In 1899 social reformer Jacob Riis described a metropolis “barely yet out of its knickerbockers” yet poised for greatness; Riis believed its enduring challenge would be to care for the poor. Novelist Theodore Dreiser agreed, for in New York the strong “are so very strong, and the weak so very, very, weak—and so very, very, many.” The wealth generated by economic success in New York was never totally subservient to the demands of the affluent.

Compassion is hardly part of the city’s cold image, but caring for its less fortunate citizens has been a major theme of its modern history. In this most capitalist of all American cities, a strong element of socialist ideology fostered the creation of the nation’s largest municipal hospital and university systems, vast areas of public housing, and generous welfare benefits for the poor. City programs exist in uneasy proximity to a remarkable collection of the world’s best private hospitals, some of its most expensive apartments, and dozens of private universities. Social initiatives first attempted in New York became precursors of New Deal programs in the 1930s, while the city’s American Labor and Liberal parties constantly advanced an agenda of public responsibility. Although the Democratic Party organization served many constituencies, it held political power because it never forgot the poorest citizens, who also voted. The enormous wealth of the city funded a wide range of altruistic programs without major difficulty until the 1960s, when welfare rolls exceeded one million people and crime rates soared. The vast decline in manufacturing and the taxes it provided also undermined the city economy, and New York suddenly became a metropolis out of control. Mayor John Lindsay never mastered the crisis; he attempted to create “superagencies” to deal with human resources, the environment, health, housing, and parks even as the borough presidents and community groups demanded greater local control. Lindsay’s long feud with the state government eventually led to loss of central control over the school system in 1969. By 1975 the city nearly fell into bankruptcy, its finances were administered from Albany, and its social compact appeared on the verge of anarchy.

In the last decades of the 20th century, New York’s rebirth was spectacular. Mayor Edward I. Koch restored fiscal security to the city, and his administration began the slow task of restoring lost confidence. Koch’s trademark question, “How’m I doing?” became identified with city revival; as the national economy rebounded so, too, did New York. Commercial construction boomed, and multibillion-dollar refurbishing programs of subsidized housing and transportation systems were instigated. Not even the great stock disaster of October 19, 1987—when the Dow Jones average dropped by more than one-fifth—halted the turnabout. The 1990s were a decade of unprecedented wealth accumulation in the country’s richest city, but poverty and homelessness endured as societal realities.

In 1989 the U.S. Supreme Court declared that New York’s government system, which gave equal representation to populous Brooklyn and underdeveloped Staten Island, violated the “one man, one vote” mandate of the Constitution. The Board of Estimate was to be abolished, and a November referendum decided that the City Council would be expanded to 51 members in order to enhance the power of minorities. Council authority over the budget, land use, zoning, and franchises was increased, and a new planning commission was established. The renovated council remained under Democratic control but now had the potential to oppose mayoral initiatives; when voters elected Republican Rudolph Giuliani as mayor in 1993, the urban political scene became confrontational. Battles over educational leadership, city planning, and spending projections marked Giuliani’s administration, even as it successfully reduced city crime in all categories and pruned welfare rolls. By the late 1990s the city’s murder rate had fallen to the lowest level in 35 years. Aggressively preventive tactics pioneered in New York substantially reduced the national crime rate, while “quality of life” policing made citizens feel safe on the streets. Acting in concert with national welfare reform, Giuliani’s administration established the country’s largest workfare program while slashing welfare rolls by more than 400,000. In 2001, near the end of his administration, Giuliani reversed the earlier perception that he had turned his back on the city’s tradition of compassion by leading the vast rescue and recovery effort at the site of the World Trade Center disaster.

Education

Primary and secondary systems

Ever since the first school opened in New Amsterdam in the 1630s, New York has sought fine schools, but until after the American Revolution education was largely handled by tutors. Public funds for education became available after 1795, and in Manhattan a Free School Society was formed to disperse the state money. The growing numbers of New York Roman Catholics were distressed by what they interpreted to be Protestant indoctrination within the school system. In the 1840s Archbishop John Hughes was instrumental in establishing a Catholic parochial school system, which has continued to offer an alternative to public education. Neither system ever achieved universal attendance during the 19th century, however, for not until 1874 was a compulsory attendance law for the primary grades enacted; new immigration subsequently overloaded all city schools. After consolidation, Greater New York launched a massive public building program to provide schools where a half-million eligible students could be educated each year. Secondary education was not even offered to its children until the late 19th century, but by 1920 massive construction made primary education, along with both ordinary and specialized high schools, available for everyone. Several New York high schools—Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, and Performing Arts—have retained national reputations for excellence, and the school system has also provided evening classes in adult education and practical skills for the city’s large immigrant population.

In the late 1990s New York administered the nation’s largest public school system; more than one million students attend in excess of a thousand public schools. Unionization of city teachers began in 1916; the American Federation of Teachers is now the bargaining agent for the present-day staff. In the last decades of the 20th century, education became a sphere of unending controversy. The postwar white exodus to suburbia drained students from public schools and transformed them into minority-dominated institutions most of whose instructors were white and Jewish. During the 1960s a series of strikes and ugly racial confrontations caused disorder in the city, and in 1969 the state legislature divided the city into 32 districts. Henceforth primary education was to be controlled by elected governing boards so that educational goals could be established by local communities. Each board would select its superintendent, but resources would still be allocated by a chancellor of the entire school system, who was named by a mayor-dominated Board of Education.

The unwieldy system worked only sporadically, and by the 1990s its failures were apparent. In some districts, allies of the teachers’ union dominated elections that were largely ignored by voters. In others, coalitions of minority residents installed poor administrators who made the schools vehicles for patronage and corruption. Wage levels declined relative to those of suburban systems, racial segregation in schools caused by housing patterns and economic stratification increased, and many tenured teachers were accused of ignoring the special needs of minority students. Dropouts increased, performance levels fell precipitously, and violence in schools appeared endemic. Colleges and businesses alike complained bitterly that schools turn out “functional illiterates.” In the last two decades of the 20th century, the system was led by a dozen chancellors, and the mayor’s role in their selection became as highly politicized as district appointment of school principals. In 1996 the state legislature once again intervened, ending local authority to name principals and attempting to remove party and ethnic politics from the system. In 1999 principals agreed to surrender their tenure rights in return for larger wage increases. The long decline of a once-praised system has benefited parochial and private schools in New York, although the cost of a nonpublic education has escalated considerably.

Higher education

The metropolitan area has more than 80 colleges, including such nationally famed institutions as Columbia (1754), New York (1831), Fordham (1841), and Rockefeller (1901) universities and Cooper Union (1859). Its vast municipal system, the City University of New York (CUNY), has more than 20 units and traces its origin to City College (1847). However, the introduction of open admissions in the 1970s brought the ills of the high schools into the college system. CUNY’s strong academic tradition soon mutated into what became derisively known as “Remediation U,” and from the late 1990s university trustees were engaged in an effort to strengthen the baccalaureate. Even the most selective colleges found it necessary to enhance basic student skills. Despite these difficulties, New York remains one of the nation’s premier university towns and, from Ivy League to community college, its streets pulsate with student life.

Cultural life

As real as the bedrock beneath Manhattan is the cultural attraction generated by New York. For more than a century, talented but unrecognized artists as well as ambitious wanna-bes from every part of the globe and nation have gravitated to a city they feel is their spiritual home. A steady stream of the cultural elite flows toward the metropolis and creates an electric atmosphere. In virtually every artistic field—theatre, music, dance, painting, literature, fashion, film, print, and sports—the city is the “place to go” to see if you can “make it.” No environment offers a harsher test of one’s abilities. Literary figures as diverse as Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, O. Henry, the members of the Algonquin Round Table, Rex Stout, and Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) have all attempted to explain the allure and the dangers of the city; all succeeded and failed, to some degree. In the 19th century Manhattan was home to the Hudson River school of artists, and the Tenth Street Studio in Greenwich Village and its surrounding area shaped the national imagination. Willa Cather, who grew up in Nebraska, came to write of the West on Bank Street in the Village, while Jackson Pollock came from the West to create Abstract Expressionism and help change the direction of modern art. But perhaps the greatest proof of New York’s dynamic appeal are the millions of annual visitors who come to experience its vibes, variety, and vitality. Whether artist, visitor, or resident, all seem united in the belief that New York is, as writer Joan Didion described it, “an infinitely romantic nation, the mysterious mixture of all love, money and power, the shining and perishable dream.”

Undoubtedly culture is big business in New York, and no city in the country has more institutions and people dedicated to serving its demands. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1870) is probably the best known and most visited of the city museums, but the metropolis has scores of concert halls, schools of art, music and acting, restaurants, and galleries, as well as agents, promoters, and hucksters of every type. It is the city of promoter P.T. Barnum, philanthropist James (“Diamond Jim”) Brady, and financier Malcolm Forbes. It can fulfill every desire, from photography to pornography to publicity. The Cloisters (1938), part of the Metropolitan Museum, specializes in medieval art, while the avant-garde sensibility is catered to at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA; 1929) and at the Whitney (1930) and Guggenheim (1939) museums. Natural sciences and the shape of the skies can be studied at the American Museum of Natural History (1869), while those who seek the best pre-Columbian or Egyptian art should journey to the Brooklyn Museum of Art (1823). Those interested in Native Americans, the tenement house, dolls, or African art will find institutions specific to their needs. Great stone lions, dubbed “Patience” and “Fortitude” by Mayor La Guardia, guard the New York Public Library (1895), whose mammoth holdings include the Schomburg Center (African American history) and are exceeded in the nation only by the Library of Congress. Researchers are also drawn to the Morgan Library (notably for medieval and Renaissance Europe) and Ellis Island (immigration). Whether the crowds who come to New York expect Fun City, the Big Apple, or Gotham, the city can fulfill every expectation of an admiring public.

The arts

Ever since the 1890s Broadway has reigned as the “Great White Way,” the major theatrical centre of the country. New York produces, casts, and consumes the legitimate plays and musical extravaganzas that Americans desire as well as thousands of other shows that only true supporters come to see. Theatre is New York’s “fabulous invalid,” periodically near death and at other times revived, and Variety (1905) is the news magazine that informs the world of its health. The city’s Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway venues are where experimental theatre apprentices playwrights, actors, dancers, and directors. In the last decades of the 20th century, major new stages in Times Square, skyscrapers, and a suddenly chic 42nd Street drew new audiences, and the increased price of tickets showed wider interest. For bargain seekers, Manhattan also offers free Shakespeare in Central Park, while cut-rate tickets to current productions are always available. In every borough local groups offer more performances than anyone can attend.

Completed in the 1960s, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is a mecca for the arts patron. It is home to the Metropolitan Opera Association; the New York Philharmonic performs in Avery Fisher Hall; and the New York State Theater offers a variety of attractions, including the New York City Ballet, which has the highest reputation of any troupe in the country. The finest concerts in a very musical city are heard in Carnegie Hall (1891); the two million dollars donated by Andrew Carnegie for its construction have perhaps given more pleasure per dollar than any other philanthropic endowment. Town Hall in Manhattan and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the latter the oldest performing arts centre in the nation, offer viable alternatives. Performance art is always available, varies from extortionately expensive to amateur free events, and is enjoyed by the complete range of audiences.

No city is as recognizable to other Americans as is New York; its glittering nightlife and its gritty neighbourhoods are equally part of the national consciousness. Film directors love to use the city as their set, and city administrations have increasingly encouraged the practice. Until World War I, Queens was the centre of the early film industry, and afterward New York remained vital to documentary and independent film production. Astoria regained its position as a studio centre in the 1980s. It is also fitting that the city that transmitted the first television signals became the setting for many of the most successful shows. From The Goldbergs to I Love Lucy to All in the Family to Seinfeld, New York City became part of the American cultural experience. The Museum of Television and Radio (1975) allows anyone to recapture famous episodes from this somewhat fictionalized yet also very real New York.

Recreation

New York never ignores the needs of its ordinary people. Since the colonial period, parades and festivals have been part of city life and the Halloween and Thanksgiving Day parades of modern times illustrate the strength of the tradition; in the 19th century parades also provided occasions for Roman Catholic and Protestant Irish to battle in the streets. Yiddish theatre was born on the Lower East Side, while vaudeville and burlesque were invented to draw audiences to more earthy delights. After 1898 the greater city understood that it had obligations to create green space beyond the expanses of Central and Prospect parks, so gardens, along with zoos in every borough, were provided for residents. New York has hundreds of parks, but its myriad of other entertainment possibilities include a miniature reproduction of the metropolis constructed in the Queens Museum, a restored Staten Island village at Richmondtown, or the jewel-like Orchard Beach in the Bronx. No public beach is as famous as Coney Island, and thousands of bathers often crowd there close to the sea; its Cyclone Roller Coaster became a national landmark in 1988. Almost as many find the same experience available at Rockaway Beach in Queens. Amusement parks at both sites provide thrills for generations of New Yorkers.

Many professional as well as recreational sports are popular in the metropolis, but probably no sport is as closely identified with New York as baseball. In 1903 a professional baseball club, the Highlanders, moved from Baltimore to New York and was renamed the Yankees in 1913. The team has since played in every borough except Staten Island, won more than two dozen world championships, and become history’s most dominant sports franchise. Manhattan also loved its Giants baseball team, before the club’s departure for San Francisco in 1957; Brooklyn lived for “next year” with the Dodgers; and Queens (since 1962) has been home to the New York Mets. New York teams have won professional championships in football, basketball, hockey, and association football (soccer) as well. Madison Square Garden, now in its fourth incarnation, has been the site of many championship boxing matches, innumerable other sporting matches, musical events, and political conventions and may well be the most storied indoor arena in American history. Whether in watching sports, picnicking in the parks, visiting museums, attending the theatre, capitalizing on the city’s rich array of eateries (from ethnic delis and sidewalk carts to five-star restaurants), or simply watching its street life, the quality of cultural activities available in New York is unsurpassed.